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Tuesday, December 15, 2009

So keeping with my spirit of the 12 Blogs of Christmas, I decided to do 8 lines from a WIP. Well, the problem arose of what WIP, and then it hit me. I'm trying to begin promoting RTD since it'll be pubbed in January or February. So, I decided to do a teaser from the sequel to RTD, which is a YA Literary Fiction. I don't have a name yet, but most of the characters from RTD will be making an appearance as well as some new characters. The story moves from 1939 when the story left off to 1964, and it follows Jackson Tate's cousin, Parker's, three daughters: Eighteen year old Caroline, Seventeen year old Julianne or Jules, and fifteen year old, Emma Katherine, or Emmie. The sweltering summer of 64’ changed us. Forged in the fiery inferno that almost consumed us, that threatened to squelch our voice and even snuff out our very lives, we were molded into the women we became. I turned fifteen that summer. The tomboy, the baby, the sheltered child of antiquated privilege made off the backs of cotton mill workers. Until then, all I knew was how much I admired the delicate, lady-like gentility of my oldest sister, Caroline, and how I coveted the rebellious, free-spirit of my middle sister, Julianne, or Jules as she was called. That summer we didn’t need blackand white scenes on the TV of bloodied brutality coupled with cries for freedom and the anthem of “We Shall Overcome” from places like Selma, Birmingham, or even Atlanta because the drums of war raged all around us. The sins of our father, long submerged in the river of time, floated to the surface like a body weighed down with rocks—bloated, putrid, and hideously distorted. From society ladies frenzied fanning, the wind brought fragments of the truth about a place I only thought existed in the Bible and ofman I thought was only a ghost. Damascus. John Christian